Webmail.us, Amazon S3, and Our New Data Backups System

Several months ago we set out to improve the way we perform email data backups. We were quickly outgrowing our legacy tape backup system. Backups were taking too long to process and data storage costs weren’t scaling the way we wanted them to. We looked into building our own disk-based backup storage system either at Rackspace or within our own data center environment. Then Amazon changed our thinking almost overnight when they released their Simple Storage Service (S3). We knew right away that Amazon’s new web-scale storage platform was something special. So we started playing with it, writing test applications, and soon were talking with Amazon engineers about what we were looking to accomplish.
Tonight, we’re announcing Vault – our new data backup system that is leveraging Amazon S3 to backup and encrypt email and related data, replicating it across multiple Amazon data centers on a nightly basis. Amazon also has a case study online about how we’re working together.
Below are some helpful articles if you’d like to learn more about Amazon’s web service initiatives:
– Business Week on Jeff Bezo’s Risky Bet [on Web Services]
– The CEO of SmugMug on How They Leverage Amazon S3
– Read/Write/Web on Amazon Rolling out its Visionary WebOS Strategy
Hats off to Matt who did a great job leading this project and Mark, the other member of the Vault team. They’ve got some exciting plans for how we’re going to build on top of this new platform. More on that later…